Digital Customer Experience (CX)
- Mohit Malhotra
- Apr 22, 2024
- 6 min read
Customer is KING. Yet, in an era of “DIGITAL DARWINISM” where technology, society, and business models rapidly evolve, customer experience is often elusive.
Another year has passed and Digital Customer Experience (CX) finds itself – once again – the battleground and at the top of many business agendas.
With each year passes, Consumers are more empowered than before. Technology has, in essence, shifted power to the user. Understanding that shift is fundamental when thinking about the future of experience. It has touched everyone.
Too many organisations are still suffering from a disjointed approach to customer experience as they look to digitize their businesses. Companies need to own the end-to-end journey in terms of digital experience if they have a hope of meeting customer expectations. Digitizing every aspect of a business, as well as harnessing the data that comes from it for customer gain, are imperatives if organisations want to survive over the next few years.
Today’s challenge: Move from carts to hearts
“Everyone owns the customer experience…. At every touch point of the organisation,” defining customer experience as the culmination of people, process, technology and strategy, but also ensuring there is consistency, accuracy and ease of effort for that consumer. In short, importance of providing the customer with the right information at the right time on their preferred platform or location.
The boundary between digital and physical keeps getting blurrier, and emerging technologies like virtual reality, AI, Blockchain, IoT is going mainstream.
“Bar for providing exceptional Customer Digital Experience is raised”
"Anything less than real time is out of time"
It is predicted that more and more organisations will redirect their investments towards customer experience innovations. It’s no longer just about omni-channel, but more multi-sensory and complex to design. To adapt, companies must embrace a design thinking approach focused not on technology but on E’s of the game i.e. ease, effectiveness, and emotion.
CDX a moving target…to deliver on expectations ADAPT…
Provide seamless, relevant experiences in the moment. Blend digital and physical to eliminate friction, give customers control, and anticipate their needs. In turn, reduce costs, expand your customer base, and boost loyalty with current customers.
Examples:
Eliminate payment register by automating payments via its mobile app.
Personalize customer experience by allowing guests to select the exact room they will stay in, surely guests love it.
Help customers track the status and location of their packages. Provide reroute, remotely authorize, or reschedule package deliveries at a moment's notice.
Remember past purchases and offer them as shortcuts to customers placing orders.
Use Design Thinking to not just survive but thrive...crafting and improving digital experiences continuously, in a responsive way that supports customers' needs and business goals.
Success factors in transforming digital customer experience
Designing and digitizing customer journeys - the primary goal is to thoroughly rethink the way the journey works, instead of simply fixing inefficiencies along the way.
Increasing speed and agility in insight generation - Generating insights in an “agile” way in a digital-customer-experience transformation can start with conducting an in-depth user-experience assessment of current customer touch points. During the journey design process, agile insights can then be used to rapidly test new ideas and journey steps with customers, with more scale than traditional focus groups.
Making the digital journey relevant - Pooling relevant content and creating a delightful experience, for example, by bundling functionalities in one app, is key, especially for digital channels that are not frequently used.
Developing agility in delivering journey transformations - delivering customer-journey transformations following agile methodologies in which high-performing, cross-functional teams work toward a common, customer-centric vision, relying on real-time decision making, rapid iteration, and end products that can be presented and refined continually.
Key trends to look out for….
Mobile experience (MX) a key priority.
Personalized experience (needs, preferences).
Self-service analysis of customer experience data leveraging big data to identify trends and preferences.
Emerging technologies combined with cloud will automate more tasks in the area of CDX, giving digital teams more time to focus on other more valuable tasks reducing operational costs, improving security and performance.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - Respect Customer privacy, consent and data.
Unify messaging across channels creating a unified customer experience.
Fit technology to your customers’ needs not the other way around…
Look and feel is important, so as added functionality and custom content…
Obviously, predicting future is a difficult, but one thing is for sure – former strategies will not always fit with what the future holds. Digital CX is a rapidly evolving field, which means continuous improvement of processes is the way forward to make progress.
Future of Experience….
Application leaders focused on CRM and CX should support customer-centric strategies.
Open the lines of communication: Improve your organization’s ability to listen to customers, analyse the feedback and act on their needs.
Make customers the focus: Build customer empathy into processes, policies and IT system configuration.
“Research says businesses with CRM that reflects empathy toward customers will be three times more likely to fend off a digital disruptor”
Elevate respect: Establish privacy guidelines that lean more toward benefiting customers rather than the organization.
“Research says modern consumers are often willing to accept that organizations are collecting data about them, but they want that data treated in a considerate manner”
Inspire your team: Use tools that optimize the employee experience in everything from hiring and on-boarding to workflows and professional development.
Roadmap for Digital CX Improvements
In this environment, profitable growth will not result from doing things incrementally better, but from doing things fundamentally differently by shifting from products to outcomes.
• Re-imagine business models – Integrate vertically and virtually to compete as an ecosystem, transform products into services, and capitalize on knowledge
• Re-imagine business processes – Engage consumers with real-time personalization, enable hyper-local demand and supply networks, and optimize capacity with hyper-connected manufacturing.
• Reimagine work – Fundamentally transform productivity, exponentially improve enterprise intelligence, and empower a flexible, agile workforce to enable agility at speed
Discover: Learn how emerging interfaces change the nature of winning digital CX.
Disruptive technology, such as bots, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AI), wearables, voice activation, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual personal assistants (VPAs), artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, will enhance and become integral parts of our day-to-day customer, employee and other users' experiences.
Prepare: Adopt the skills and practices needed to support CX strategy
Build team: Understand direct/in-direct (employees) touch points that may influence customer experience.
Produce a portfolio of planned and ongoing IT projects that are ranked by their financial and productivity benefits, as well as by how much they improve the customer's experience.
E.g. Multi-channel collection, Real-time alerts and actions, Single view of customer, Self-service, Track for customer, add channels, Personalize products etc.
Leverage Technology types to enhance CDX: Voice of the customer, Business process management, Multi-channel customer service, Customer analytics, Master data management, Content management, Personalization, UX design tools and platforms, Loyalty management, Privacy management, Sales force automation
Consolidate data from direct, indirect sources e.g. market research, forum, complaint, tweet, email, chat, call, notes, web, store, contact center etc.
Map Customer journey: visualize, share, and integrate your journey maps in support of your digital CDX improvements as they move from concept to complete offering.
Execute: Deliver digital experiences that meet customers' needs by mastering the iterative approach to design — prototyping and testing solutions as well as evolving ideas.
Focus on controlling Voice of the Customer and metrics to survive. Avoid only focusing on short-term “plate spinning”; have a structured plan based on the customer lifecycle.
“Steal Ideas from the Best”
Optimize: Measure performance and benchmarks and adjust to sustain improvements e.g. Employee Engagement, Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty Churn Retention, Advocacy Brand Reputation etc.
Digital Customer Experience requires Digital Business Platform to enable the new capabilities and business models of digital business.
Information systems platform — Supports the back office and operations, such as ERP and core systems.
Customer experience platform — Contains the main customer-facing elements, such as customer and citizen portals, multi-channel commerce and customer apps.
Data and analytics platform — Contains information management and analytical capabilities. Data management programs and analytical applications fuel data-driven decision making, and algorithms automate discovery and action.
IoT platform — Connects physical assets for monitoring, optimization, control and monetization. Capabilities include connectivity, analytics and integration to core and OT systems.
Ecosystems platform — Supports the creation of, and connection to, external ecosystems, marketplaces and communities. API management, control and security are its main elements.
The time to unleash the power of digitization is now, both to maintain a healthy business and to drive new growth, and to balance current infrastructure and future innovation without disruption.
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